Inside LabourStart

Up until five minutes ago, if you added a keyword to a news story, it inserted two blank spaces before this.  This has just now been fixed.

Updated 4 Nov 2008 – see below

We have a lot of newswires, in many languages, and in different formats. Nearly all of them work fine but some require changes. I’ll be listing some of the things I’m fixing here:

1. Norwegian RSS: Now fixed to render correctly in iso-8859-1 (not Unicode). The same change is applied to the French and Dutch newswires today. All would have been showing the wrong dates for news stories – now fixed.
2. Wal-Mart JS: today fixed to use new database
3. McDonalds JS: now fixed to use new database – used only on McJobs.org (not yet live)
4. Nestle, Unilever JS: Created in early October at the request of the IUF and used on their sites
5. Women’s news in Finnish: Updated to use the new database – used by SAK, the Finnish national trade union center

More soon …

The regional news pages for Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central America and South America are now working again – in English. The JavaScript and RSS news feeds still need some work.

It was pointed out to us that the clever solution we’ve come up for in the language home pages – which shows the most recently submitted stories on top – wasn’t yet working on the country home pages. So in countries with lots of stories each day, such as Canada, the most recently submitted stories were appearing at the bottom of the list. This has now been fixed.

I’ve resumed work on this — a complicated project. A first draft of the regional news pages (in English only for now) can be seen here and here.

Arieh added a comment:

Eric: Thanks for the work on the regional news pages, specifically the Middle East one. Not a major matter, but can Bahrain be included? There may be other relevant countries not included, but that’s all I noticed at first glance.

Eric replied:

Now done.  If anyone spots any other countries missing from regional pages, let me know.

I’ve a couple of important fixes to the pages that show news by country (e.g., Canada) and state/province (e.g., Ontario).

First, we’re now showing the same list of languages on the latter as we do on the index pages and the news-by-country page.

Second, I’ve fixed the signup to our mailing list on the state/province page which was still showing the icontact details.

Third, there is now a mailing list signup for the first time on the national news pages.

This is important, because there is a daily trickle of people now signing up directly to the mailing lists from our news pages, and we know that the national news pages (especially the US one) are hugely popular.

We need to keep paying attention for things that may have slipped through in all the changes we’ve made in recent weeks as we moved over to the new database and mailing list system.